Mrs. Pope had decided to do a little investigating of her own. It wasn’t that she expected the women to be criminals. Not as such. She just wanted some rational explanation for the way she felt about them, the suspicion and unease she couldn’t bring herself to admit might be misplaced.
So she was going to make a few innocent little inquiries. She had no idea where they would lead.
It had all started when she was emptying her husband’s wastepaper basket: Maurice was getting careless. He dropped things into bins that staff should not see, and wives should not see, either—the man couldn’t keep his hands to himself. What she hadn’t expected to find were the torn-up scraps of a letter from the Natural History Museum woman. Intrigued, she put together the pieces like a jigsaw. The letter said something about needing his help to get a visa. Miss Benson had given the address of the boardinghouse where they were staying, and since it was only a short ride in the car, and since it was a lovely day, and since Mrs. Pope had nothing better to do, she decided to pay a visit.
Just in a friendly way.
The owner of the boardinghouse was one of those difficult French women. She complained extensively about a dog the women had smuggled in. She went on and on about this dog. No, she had no forwarding address for Miss Benson, because if she did, she would send her a bill for the dog, though now that Mrs. Pope mentioned it, she remembered there’d been some kind of issue with her luggage.
“What kind of issue?”
“It never arrived.”
“Do you mean they left Nouméa without it?”
The French woman shrugged. All she knew was that they’d gone in a jeep, very early in the morning.
“A jeep?” Mrs. Pope was aware of sounding too excited. Alarm bells were ringing inside her, like chimes. She said, “I suppose they bought the jeep for the journey?”
The woman shrugged again. All she knew was that she’d never seen them with a jeep before, and suddenly they had one. Mrs. Pope thanked her for being so helpful and promised that if she saw the women she would mention the complaints about the dog.
It took several calls to find the lost-property offices for the airline, but once she had the right one, there were no more hitches. She drove straight there. Yes, they had received two items of luggage belonging to the passenger Margery Benson.
So where were they now?
They were in the cupboard, waiting to go back to Britain.
Mrs. Pope moved her tongue precisely as if she were clipping out the words with scissors. “You mean that you have them here?”
Yes, yes, said the very helpful official. Would she like to take them?
Mrs. Pope said thank you, she would. She would like that very much. Splendid.
The official asked if she could see Mrs. Pope’s paperwork. Mrs. Pope said she could not understand what difference her paperwork would make. She was simply trying to help a poor British woman who’d been left stranded on the island without her luggage.
The official said that if she did not have Mrs. Pope’s paperwork, she could not let her take the luggage.
She said in her best French, “Seriously?”
The official looked right back at her and said, “Yes. Very seriously.” As if she was actually accusing Mrs. Pope of deceit.
Mrs. Pope drove home and collected her paperwork, but by the time she got back, the office was closed. She watched the official, flipping the sign on the door from Ouvert to Fermé. She rapped on the glass. The official waved and pulled down the blind. It wasn’t even midafternoon.
The office was closed for the rest of the weekend, though Mrs. Pope drove down twice while Maurice was at the golf club. She was in a foul mood, even at the concert that evening in aid of the local missionary school. It hurt to keep smiling.
She went back with her paperwork, first thing on Monday. It was a different official this time, and he said nothing about needing authorization. She waited as he went to a cupboard at the back to fetch the luggage, feeling a sudden prick of disdain that it should be so simple. He brought out a battered plastic suitcase, not even real leather, and an incredibly heavy Gladstone bag, both of which he placed at her feet.
Guilt clawed the back of her neck, but only briefly. She said she would make sure it was returned to Margery Benson. She got him to fetch a cart and load it into the back of her car. She whipped a few French banknotes from her purse—she was overtipping, but she felt less compromised now she’d paid.
Back at home, she broke the lock first on the suitcase, then the Gladstone bag. The suitcase was filled with old clothing. You couldn’t even dump it on the women at the mission. It was the Gladstone bag that intrigued her.
One by one, she removed glass vials, a Kilner jar, plastic tubes. Bottles, which she opened and smelled. Collecting equipment. The sort of thing you would find in a chemistry block at a school…
She fingered the pearls of her necklace. She laughed. “Got you,” she said. “Got you.”
“You mean?” said Dolly Wiggs, at Friday craftwork. “That it was the two women who broke into the Catholic school?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Pope, all over again. They’d been through this a number of times.
“Margery Benson and her assistant?”
“Yes.”
“And stole all those things?”
“Yes, Dolly.”
“And then a jeep?”
“I can’t believe we actually met them,” said Coral Pepper. “So do you think they are spies, after all?”
“I don’t know. I have written to the Natural History Museum, asking if they know about her. Of course, I did it in a clever way.”
“Of course,” chorused the women. Mrs. Pope would only do anything in a clever way.
“They just seemed so nice,” said Dolly. “It’s hard to imagine them stealing.”
Coral Pepper looked on the verge of tears. “What should we do? Should we ring our husbands? Send the police to Poum?”
But Mrs. Pope had enjoyed her foray into detective work, and was not ready to hand it over to men. Now that the Three Kings party was over, she had nothing to look forward to until Valentine’s Day, and Valentine’s Day was not something she enjoyed. All the anonymous cards for Maurice, crowding his wastepaper bin. Besides, she wasn’t sure men would pursue the case. Men, she found, often lacked a woman’s drive.
“We need to wait until I’ve heard back from the Natural History Museum. Then we will know for certain.”
At this point, the wives went off on a tangent. They began remembering other things that had gone missing over the past few weeks. Someone’s frock had gone from her washing line. Coral Pepper had lost silver sugar tongs that had belonged to her mother. Daphne Ginger was sure she’d left a steak once on the kitchen counter, which wasn’t there when she’d got back. Mrs. Pope felt the conversation skating toward thin ice. Some of these things had happened months ago, way before Margery Benson had arrived in Nouméa with her assistant. As much as she disliked them, it was unlikely the two women had gone round pinching frocks off washing lines, not to mention choice cuts of meat. Then Daphne went completely sideways and suggested Margery Benson might even be the murderess they had all been reading about in the British papers from home. Could she, in fact, be Nancy Collett, traveling under an alias, and hiding in New Caledonia? And was her blond assistant really the Woman With No Head? Shouldn’t they should alert the French police immediately? Maybe even phone the editor of The Times?
Mrs. Pope clapped her hands. “Order!” she cried. “Order, ladies! It’s about hard evidence! We just need to wait. Something will bring them back. And as soon as we know what they’re up to, we can make our move.”